Pupils in UK will be given an “MOT” to ensure they can read properly at the age of six, the Education Secretary has said. Michael Gove said the academy system would also be extended to allow successful headteachers to take over failing primary schools.
Figures provided by the Department for Education to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme found nine per cent of boys – some 18,000 pupils – aged 11 had a reading age of seven or younger when leaving primary school.
While the proportion of youngsters achieving the necessary level 4 in English had risen from 49 per cent to 81 per cent in the last 15 years, a persistent minority of children are failing to reach even level 2, the standard expected of seven-year-olds.
Mr Gove said secondary education was pointless if children left primary school unable to read.
New teachers would be trained to use systematic synthetic phonics, regarded as the “single most effective method” to improve reading, Mr Gove said.
He added: “We also want to ensure that there is a basic check on children’s ability to read at the age of six, an MOT to ensure children are reading properly, that they are decoding the English language, in other words, they understand the individual letters, how they go together and how a word is made up.
“We want to make sure that those schools where children are not being taught to read are tackled because, ultimately, if you do not get a child reading by the time they leave primary school, by the time they arrive at secondary school the curriculum is just a closed book to them, literally.”
Other figures show that more than half of five-year-old boys in Britain are struggling in the basics after a year at primary school.
Some 53.1 per cent of five-year-old boys are failing to make a good level of development, meaning they are struggling with skills such as reading and writing, and emotional and social development.
In comparison, 34.9 per cent of girls are failing to reach this target - a gender gap of 18.2 percentage points.
The new statistics, published by the Department for Education, show how many five-year-olds are reaching specific early-learning “goals” in areas such as social skills and literacy and numeracy, and how many are reaching enough of the goals to be classed as making a “good level of development”.
The findings are based on teachers’ observations of pupils.
The figures reveal that one in six (15.1 per cent) boys could not write their own names by the age of five, compared to just 6.9 per cent of girls.
Some 9.6 per cent of boys could not say the letters of the alphabet, compared with 5.5 per cent of girls, the data show.
And nine per cent of boys could not do simple adding up by the age of five, while for girls that figure was 6.1 per cent.
The data also reveal that poorer pupils, particularly poor boys, are falling behind their richer classmates.